Wednesday, June 10, 2015

‘Russians are the Soviet Slaves of Today,’ Panfilov Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, June 10 – The Soviet
system transformed the population of the USSR into slaves of a particular type,
and “the present-day Russian slave is a direct descendent of the Soviet ones,”
according to Oleg Panfilov, the director of the Center for Extreme Journalism
(2000-2010) and now a professor at Georgia’s Iliya State University.

Anyone who thinks
that “a contemporary Russian has emerged is deeply mistaken.” To be sure, “an
insignificant percent of Russians have been abroad, acquired new cars and already
cannot imagine life without good clothes and shoes … But all these goods of ‘world
civilization’ have changed Russians only externally” (ru.krymr.com/content/article/27061842.html).

“Internally, they
remain the very same Soviet slaves to a great degree envious and as before
uneducated. Only now the Russian slave has another ideology; he must now
respect ‘the Russian world’ and its leader Putin,” ideas that are just as
unclear as the ones Soviet communists tried to impose.

Despite the years that have passed
since the end of the USSR, “the slaves are struggling for the right to remain
slaves.” The hatred they show toward Ukraine and Georgia are part and parcel of
this, Panfilov continues, a reflection of “envy and hatred and a desire to
punish those countries for their decisions to become independent.”

Soviet slaves constantly thought
about the need to “become a hero,”to
die for whatever cause the leaders announced.“But in order to die heroically, one must fight; and they are going now
to do just that,” from the lack of something better after having watched “propaganda
on television.”

“A few really
want to be heroes,” Panfilov says, “because throughout their lives they have
heard the strange song with the words ‘and as one we will die in the struggle
for this,’” “’this’” being whatever the current leader – and that is now Putin
says it is.“For 74 years, Soviet people
went to die for ‘peace in the entire world’ and for the victory of communism.
Now, they do so for ‘the Russian world.’”

“To speak with a
slave is impossible,” he continues. A slave “does not listen to any arguments,
he does not know what logic is. He hates everything Western but he wears
clothes produced there, he drives cars from there, and he goes online.”And he satisfies himself that this is not a
problem because as his leaders tell him “’they fear us.’”

“In this strange situation,”
Panfilov says, “when the Kremlin opposes the West, the slave fights
passionately but not for the opportunity to live well but simply for an empty
idea which won’t be realized.” But if anyone calls attention to the slavish
status of Russians today, the latter will be sure to respond with the Leninist
dictum: “’we are not slaves, slaves are not we.’”

That response, of
course, confirms what they are denying and highlights the continuity from Lenin’s
time to now, Panfilov says.The
Bolsheviks, as he points out, simultaneously said they were seeking to free
Russians from slavery to various institutions like the church and made them
slaves to new ones.

That reply too is
significant, he suggests. After all, it was the Bolsheviks and not him who “first
called the Russians slaves.”

“Over the years
of Soviet rule they created a new type of slave, the Soviet man who considered
that the USSR and now Russia is the best country in the world and that all must
fear it.” Creating this kind of slave took enormous time and effort because it
involved eliminating from people all human values and cultivating the
deification of whoever was in power.

The Soviet
population was transformed into “physical slaves – ‘he who does not work does
not eat’” and into mental ones as well, making that population willing to put
up with anything that the leaders insisted on.That by the way, Panfilov says, is the source of corruption in Russia
today with only this difference: in Soviet times, the party regulated
corruption, “now corruption controls the powers that be.”

The Soviet
leadership promoted in the population under its control “a constant feeling of
envy, to neighbors, colleagues, relatives, foreigners, to all who had something
and that was impossible to acquire.”But
it did even more than that: it made each of those on its territory “an
ideological slave.”

That was “the
perfected essence of Homo Soveticus,” Panfilov concludes, an individual “who
all his live lived in poverty and stood in lines … who loved his leader and
then with the appearance of a new leader hated him.”The main thing for such an individual then
and now, was “not to think for himself: the leaders will explain everything.”